Integrated Solutions Find Growth in the North American Cardiovascular Image and Information Systems Market

Macroeconomic factors and lethargic purchasing activity among cardiology providers have put the cardiology informatics market on hold starting in 2009.

Market vendors have not only to align with a decrease in procedure volume growth and reimbursement levels for cardiovascular procedures, but also are trying to accommodate the varying needs of different customer segments in this fragmented market, according to a recent market report.

Accustomed to paper-based workflow processes and legacy single modality solutions, most cardiology departments lag several years behind radiology in their adoption of cardiovascular image and information management systems (CIIMS). After providers have met the requirements for the first stages of meaningful use (MU) through their electronic medical record (EMR) implementation, the CIIMS market will in all probability begin to benefit from information technology (IT) stimulus funding starting in 2014.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan’s (Mountain View, CA, USA), an international growth consultancy company, revealed that the market earned revenues of USD 210.4 million in 2010 and estimates this to reach USD 269.6 million in 2017.
Healthcare providers’ prioritization of efforts related to EMRs and MU further challenges vendors to demonstrate tangible returns from a new integrated image and information management system. The current dynamics in cardiology IT suggest that revenues will follow a steady, but not explosive, growth path, as the market steps into a new wave of IT adoption.

Regardless of the comparative maturity of the North American picture archiving and communication system (C-PACS), stand-alone cardiovascular information system (CVIS) markets, there are growth opportunities in several clinical, product and customer sub-segments of the CIIMS market, according to Frost & Sullivan. Moreover, healthcare providers’ intensifying requirements for a single point of access to patient data and participation in enterprise IT consolidation efforts are finding resonance in the new generation of integrated CIIMS.

“This single point of access is achieved mainly through enhanced system integration and interoperability, key features of the more recent CIIMS solutions,” said Frost & Sullivan principal analyst Nadim Daher. “Other key benefits include the solutions’ ability to optimize workflow efficiency and data management, which can lead to increased productivity, higher patient throughput, and a wider line of imaging services.”

To speed up the purchase of new-generation CIIMS, cardiology informatics vendors have to align the incentives of the various clinical stakeholders in cardiology across the range of procedures and modalities, as well as of business and IT stakeholders distributed throughout the enterprise. In many instances, customized solutions that can be scaled up gradually will be a major incentive for cardiology providers’ decision to renovate their IT and workflow infrastructure.

As IT consolidation and web-based technologies enable anytime-anywhere access to cardiovascular imaging across and outside the enterprise, vendors should market this benefit to referring physicians and patient populations.

“Although the volume of cardiovascular imaging procedures in North America is no longer growing, advances in cardiovascular imaging equipment are resulting in increasing digitization and diversification of images and information as well as larger average data volumes per procedure,” concluded Mr. Daher. “Therefore, data volume requirements for primary storage, long-term archiving, and image communication will continue to grow, posing growing challenges to the cardiology enterprise that only efficient CIIMS solutions can help address.”

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